ASUS P5K Pro motherboard review

While we've covered Intel's high-end motherboard offerings courtesy of their X38 chipset at length, and even taken a peek at an X48-based offering here at Elite Bastards in recent months, we are until now yet to tackle Intel's mid-range offering for their own range of CPUs, the P35 chipset. Although, just as X38 will eventually be replaced by X48, P35 will be succeeded by P45 (with all the jokes about being fired this will bring from British hardware journalists), but with that still a little way off we've finally taken the time to sit down with a P35-sporting part to put through its paces.

The subject of this analysis is ASUS' latest offering in their P5K series, the P5K Pro, which offers guaranteed support for Intel's new 45 nanometre Core 2 CPUs to add to the feature set already on offer here. If you don't want to shell out on an X38-based part, and a huge number of PCI Express lanes for full-on CrossFire support aren't too important to you, then the P35 chipset may well suit your needs. How does the P5K Pro perform? Let's take a look.